Theodore Bikel
Actor
1924-05-02 – 2015-07-21
Austrian-born American actor, singer, and activist known for stage and screen performances including The Defiant Ones and Fiddler on the Roof. He was also active in folk music and public advocacy.
Quotes by Theodore Bikel
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Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out.
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We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.
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I am not a specialist but a general practitioner in the world of the arts.
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When something is moving you get that intake of breath and that stillness from the audience.
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By showing hunger, deprivation, starvation and brutality, as well as endurance and nobility, documentaries inform, prod our memories, even stir us to action. Such films do battle for our very soul.
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I am filled with awe that filmmakers have the capacity to stir us and give us back a sense of wonder.
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In my mind the city of Ariel is a thorn in Israel's side and a serious obstacle to peace.
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'Retiring' - within that word is 'tiring,' and I'm not tired. I don't believe in retirement, really.
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But, when I toil in the field of Jewish culture which I frequently do, I am indeed a Jewish artist.
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You cannot please all of the people all of the time, and that is truer in the arts than anywhere else.
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'Visiting Mr. Green' is a good play. I enjoy being in it, and I have a wonderful colleague, Aidan deSalaiz, to work with. Audiences like it a lot. What's not to like?
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I created the role of Captain Von Trapp.
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No movement can afford to be caught in a time warp and exist in a state of suspended animation.
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I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sing about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing.
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In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
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After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.
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I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.
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I am a Zionist, an ardent supporter of Israel, its defender when I deem Israel to be right and its critic when I deem it to be wrong.
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While we all could agree that the Zionist ideal is alive and well, there is serious doubt whether the Zionist movement can be said to be an ongoing proposition, fragmented as its components are in ideology and in practice.
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I prefer to make common cause with those whose weapons are guitars, banjos, fiddles, and words.
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